He goes among razed city blocks, where buildings once glistened like coals in the morning and evening fire and embraces the scattered flowered pushing forth from the cracked concrete, as he lays face down. A flock of blackbirds, which were clotting the wires strung from wodden poles, rise and whirl, in ever widening circles, to the beat of time, to the echo of memory, to the silence with which tears fall, snowflakes fall.

He makes himself small, works with his hands mowing lawns, finds enough to eat, every evening finds himself a place to sleep, usually under an Interstate exit ramp. The only thing he fails to do is to reduce his emotional and intellectual noise to a zero, and fails to become silent. And in this failing, he suffers.

The song rushes forth, its kneel splitting the saragossa flecked waves, of that year's yearning.